Richard Blake - Conspiracies of Rome

I thought of Saint Jerome in his desert, accused by those invisible demons of giving more time to Cicero than to the Gospels. I thought of Pope Gregory and his prayers for the souls of the pagan writers and heroes. There was a contradiction between the two cultures.

Lucius had a point, to some extent. The Church was at war with the past. At the same time, though, the Church had taken over the whole of ancient learning to a degree that he couldn’t realise. The more educated clerics were able, in ways that I myself had trouble comprehending, to hold in their minds two contradictory views of the world without letting one contaminate the other. They could read Cicero in the morning, and preach from the Gospels in the afternoon. In the evening, if they felt inclined, they could write about the Gospels in a style sometimes admirably close to Cicero. I thought to explain the plan behind the English mission. But Lucius was continuing with his own explanation.

Christianity would be tolerated, he said. But every man of ability and ambition would avoid the Church once membership was no longer the path to worldly advancement. From the moment Constantine had established it, the Church had been filled with hypocrites. They mouthed one nonsensical doctrine after another, never believing a word of any of them. They didn’t believe, but they supplied an essential weight of numbers without which the Church couldn’t have triumphed. Take away that establishment, and the hypocrites would give their same essential weight to the restored Old Religion.

One generation of rigid discrimination would force Christianity back into becoming the lower-class religion from which it had started. The temples would reopen. The greater churches would have their uses changed. Once again, the smoke of sacrifice would rise from ten thousand altars, and the nightmare of the past three centuries would pass away.

But the new paganism wouldn’t be the decentralised bundle of worships that Christianity had displaced. The Old Religion was true, but its organisation had failed it. The Church was based on the fraudulent raising up of a minor Jewish deity far beyond his proper station. But the organisation of the Church from Saint Paul onwards had been a work of genius. Long before Constantine, it had mirrored in its own structures the administrative machinery of the Empire. Before ever they had been given equal status with the civil authorities, its bishops had been trained in a school of government.

A revived paganism would learn from that. No longer a bundle of self-contained worships, it would be unified at every level. Each cult would be formally assimilated with the others corresponding to it. The worship of Syrian Astarte would be combined with that of the Ephesian Artemis. And above the worship of the people, a class of philosophical priests would teach that the honour paid to every lesser deity was also honour paid to the single unmoved Mover of the Universe.

There would be a formal hierarchy, with regular councils to settle points of disputed doctrine. But, unlike with the Western Church, the civil power would predominate. The emperor would be pontifex maximus. There would be no room for patriarchs, let alone a universal bishop able to arrogate the imperial power.

Lucius spoke on, ostensibly to me, but mainly for himself, building his castles in the air as we trotted along that interminably long causeway. For a while, I thought he had caught some of my old fever. At last, though, he turned to the more immediate matter of our accommodation in Ravenna.

We’d turn up unannounced at the house of a friend close by the naval base. We’d rest. From here, we’d move on to the palace of the exarch. Even if he were up to his eyes in work, Smaragdus would receive us directly. Once those letters had been produced and read, there would be an immediate dispatch of enough soldiers to arrest every senior official in the Lateran and secure its archives. These would all be brought to Ravenna for the formal investigation of treason.

‘And what then?’ I asked.

‘That depends on events that I can neither predict nor control,’ said Lucius. ‘But one thing I can promise is that we shall both have something at least of what we most want. And we can plan our future together.’

Our future together?

I hadn’t thought of that. I owed an immense amount to Lucius. He had taken me up that day on the Tiber embankment and helped me on a journey to the truth I could never have mapped out for myself. He had saved my life. He was good in bed. But the rest of my life with him? How much had we really in common?

I wanted to read every book in the world that hadn’t yet fallen to pieces. I wanted to see much of the world. I wanted to endow the mission to my own land with riches of knowledge and its supporting gold that would multiply across the centuries. In this last respect – and perhaps in the others too – I was part of a Church that he only wanted to see destroyed.

And what did Lucius want? He wanted, I had no doubt, enough money to get his palace back into its ancient glory, and to give him the undoubted first place in noble society in Rome. That was the only reason I could see why he had made that long journey to wonderful Constantinople. I knew he’d been in the Imperial Palace. I knew he’d watched some execution in the Circus that had sickened even his firmness of mind. Had he once stepped into those vast libraries? I knew he had barely a word of Greek, and had no desire to learn more.

Women are one thing. They look after the household and have children. They can even have a sort of equality in your life once you accept their lower nature. But where would be the glue in a long relationship with Lucius?

And what about the Church? In Rome, it had all appeared obvious once Lucius explained it. Maximin hadn’t destroyed those letters because he wanted to use them to bring the pope and dispensator to justice before the exarch.

But had he? Did Maximin really want the Western Church to be despoiled and then made into a department of the imperial state, as it was in the East? Where would that leave the English mission? Was Ethelbert to become a vassal of the emperor? Was the race of educated Englishmen I was to help raise up to become pieces in a game played from Constantinople?

It had seemed obvious enough in Rome. I hadn’t given any thought at all to the wider implications of what I was doing in the first and most exciting part of our journey to Ravenna. But I had, in my conscious moments while jolting along the road in that carriage, been able to give long thought to these matters.

I fell into a guilty silence.

‘Are you feeling well, my love?’ Lucius asked, giving me a look of tender concern. ‘Does the air trouble you? We’ll be in Ravenna before evening. But we can stop at an inn built over the marshes. We can rest there awhile.’

‘I do feel rather tired,’ I lied. ‘If we can stop before very long, I’d appreciate the chance of a rest and a cup of wine.’

We stopped at the inn. This was a lighter structure than the other inns I’d seen. It rested on wooden supports sunk deep into the mud. Lucius and I bathed again and took a late, slow lunch.

‘We can slow down as much as we like,’ said Lucius. ‘I suggest we don’t put any further strain on your health in this climate. Whether we arrive in Ravenna this evening or tomorrow morning doesn’t now matter. Smaragdus will thank us for those letters, but would never appreciate being got out of bed to look at them. He’s getting old, you know. And he is just a little mad, I think I’ve already told you.

‘Let’s spend the night here,’ said Lucius, now decided.

We ordered a room. We got into bed. I slept. Stronger than for several days past, I now had no dreams.

I didn’t mean to sleep so long. I’d expected Lucius to wake me. But I eventually woke by myself as the first light of morning was stealing across the marshes outside. I could hear the big, wooden gate creaking open for the day, and the cheerful sound of men on horseback. From down in the slave quarters, I could smell the heated wine and hear the clatter of pots as breakfast was made ready.